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Wednesday, November 04, 2015

"The recently released reading and math scores from the 2015 National
Assessment of Educational Progress caused some consternation in the
education world because they went down for the first time in the history
of the NAEP. The exam is often called the nation’s report card because
it is the only measure of student achievement given periodically to a
sampling of students around the nation." according to Valerie Strauss, Reporter — Washington, D.C and runs The Answer Sheet blog.

Photo: Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post

Here is a piece about what the
drop in math scores tell us about the Common Core State Standards, which
have been implemented in most states for the past few years, and about
the Core’s relationship to the NAEP.

It
was written by Sarah Lubienski, a professor of mathematics education at
the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research focuses
on inequities in students’ mathematics outcomes and the policies and
practices that shape those outcomes. She conducts large-scale studies
using national data sets, as well as smaller, classroom-based studies.
Lubienski has chaired the National Assessment of Educational Progress
(NAEP) Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research
Association and is a member of its Grants Governing Board. Her previous
NAEP analyses have been funded by the National Center for Education
Statistics and the Institute of Education Sciences. She is co-author of The Public School Advantage: Why Public Schools Outperform Private Schools.

The one- to two-point point drops in math and reading scores on the
National Assessment of Educational Progress announced last week have
caused quite a commotion, with various critics blaming school testing,
accountability, choice and other policies prominent over the past
decade. Departing Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and other defenders
of recent policies have pointed to early implementation issues and
demographic/economic shifts as possible reasons for the disappointing
scores. The results were described as a “train wreck” by Rick Hess and a “fiasco”
by Diane Ravitch, with many critics seeing them as evidence that the
education policies of President Obama as well as his predecessor, George
W. Bush, have been counterproductive.

If we dig deeper into the data, we can get a clearer sense of recent
trends and the likely reasons for them. Although most reports of NAEP
mathematics performance focus on overall math scores, NAEP actually
tracks subscores for student performance in five strands:
Number/Operations, Algebra, Geometry, Measurement and Data
Analysis/Probability. In contrast with the “back to basics” era of the
1970s and 80s, which focused on number computation, in 1989 the National
Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) promoted the importance of
teaching these five strands throughout Pre-K-12th grades.

This was a major shift for schools, and it makes sense that, after
the NAEP test became aligned with the new NCTM standards and schools
began to align their curricula and assessments with those standards, we
would see a steady increase in NAEP scores. And that is, indeed, what
happened. Children do learn what we teach them.

Probability and
statistics, in particular, was quite new to the school mathematics
curriculum, especially in early grades. Probability is critically
important for making smart consumer, health, and political decisions and
yet adults are notoriously prone to misconceptions about probability.
For example, if you flip a coin and gets five heads in a row, you are
NOT more likely to get tails on the next flip – the coin does not
remember. Hence, developing students’ understanding of probability from
an early age seemed like a good idea when NCTM introduced it back in
1989. On the other hand, emphasizing every math strand every year
contributes to the “mile wide, inch deep” problem that the Common Core
State Standards tries to address.Read more... Source: Washington Post

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About Me

Hello, my name is Helge Scherlund and I am the Education Editor and Online Educator of this personal weblog and the founder of eLearning • Computer-Mediated Communication Center.
I have an education in the teaching adults and adult learning from Roskilde University, with Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) and Human Resource Development (HRD) as specially studied subjects. I am the author of several articles and publications about the use of decision support tools, e-learning and computer-mediated communication. I am a member of The Danish Mathematical Society (DMF), The Danish Society for Theoretical Statistics (DSTS) and an individual member of the European Mathematical Society (EMS). Note: Comments published here are purely my own and do not reflect those of my current or future employers or other organizations.